Guiding catheters are instruments that allow a physician to locate and cannulate vessels in a patient's heart for performing various medical procedures, including venography and implanting of cardiac pacing devices. Cannulating heart vessels requires navigating a small diameter, flexible guide through convoluted vasculature into a heart chamber, and then into a destination heart vessel. Once the destination heart vessel is reached, the catheter acts as a conduit for insertion of payloads into the vessel.
A pre-shaped guiding catheter is typically used to locate the destination vessel. A fixed shape catheter is adequate in many cases where the pathway is not significantly convoluted and the pathway does not deviate significantly between patients. In situations where structural anomalies or significant variations exist, use of a fixed shape catheter may require that the clinician stock multiple size and shapes of catheters to account for potential variations. In many applications, however, the simple and familiar pre-shaped catheter makes it the preferred tool of choice.
The major goal of a guiding catheter procedure is to find and cannulate a vessel of interest in the least amount of time. Finding and cannulating the coronary sinus, for example, can become a time consuming, trial and error procedure even in a healthy patient. Patients exhibiting symptoms of advanced heart disease can have blockages or deformations of heart structure, further complicating the task of locating the ostium.
Some common techniques are used to aid the physician in visualizing the distal end of a guiding catheter during cannulation. These techniques include the procedures of angiography and venography. The procedures involve injecting a radio-opaque dye into the bloodstream to X-ray map blood vessels. Typically, the catheter is radio-opaque as well in order to be clearly located. Although effective, this method requires exposing the patient to radiation, and therefore exposure times are necessarily limited. Further, injection of the dye can cause local thrombophlebitis, though this is now rare with modern contrast agents.
Another approach used in assisting catheter guidance is endoscopy, a technique using a fiber optic camera to visualize the blood vessel interior. This method can be effective, but is expensive and is not always adaptable to the geometries required of a guiding catheter intended for applications such as right heart access.
There is a need for an improved guiding catheter for accessing heart vessels that can be easily guided by a clinician through a convoluted pathway. There is a further need for a catheter that provides an inexpensive and safe way to visualize the location of the catheter tip relative to an opening of a destination vessel during a cannulation procedure. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and addresses other deficiencies of prior art implementations and techniques.